tl;dr: Try out telecast.company ; share your complaints/gripes on GitHub . 2005 birthed the iPod Video and YouTube . 20 years later… it's 2025. Compare YouTube against the podcast (iPod broadcast) ecosystem. YouTube pisses off its creators, fuels a clickbait thumbnail arms-race, and fosters addiction (protip: disable recommendations ). Podcasters thrive in an ecosystem of interviews, educational content, and long-form journalism. Okay, this is a bit unfair. Trash podcasts exist. Q...

In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The eruption started on June 12, and three days later it culminated in a tremendous explosion. By the time pyroclastic flows — incandescent avalanches of molten rock and gas — tumbled down its sterilized slopes, Pinatubo’s peak had been obliterated and replaced by a 2.5-kilometer-wide chasm. The eruption killed more… Source In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The...

Right now there’s a cruise ship parked outside Cabo Verde because of an outbreak of Andes virus . Yep, another cruise ship. I don’t get the appeal. It’s like a big open-air serial passage experiment: you get a bunch of old people with failing immune systems in close contact and race a pathogen through them. How much should I worry about this? Is this early January of 2020? I tried asking Claude but the biosecurity filter kept blocking my queries. The WHO says : Alth...

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote , that's the one with the particularly bad environmental record . The gas turbines installed to power the facility initially ran without Clean Air Act permits or pollution control devices, which they got away with by classifyi...

Steering Zig Fmt May 8, 2026 Two tips on using zig fmt effectively. Read this if you are writing Zig, or if you are implementing a code formatter. For me, zig fmt is better than any other formatter I used: rustfmt , the one in IntelliJ, deno fmt . zig fmt is steerable. For every syntactic construct, it has several variations for how it might be laid out. The variation used is selected by looking at what’s currently in a file. Easier to show a pair of examples: f(...

Wars aren’t won by those with most cause, but whose story’s best told. Join us at the Tournament of Harrenhal! We are thrilled to announce (albeit later than intended) tickets are on sale for Game of Thrones: The Mad King, a new stage production, opening at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer. The world premiere begins Monday, July 20, and runs through Saturday, September 5. A sweeping new stage epic from the world of George R. R. Martin, scripted by Dun...

Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further. Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child...

Over the last couple of months Rahul Garg published a series of posts here on how to reduce the friction in AI-assisted programming . To make it easier to put these ideas into practice he’s now built an open-source framework to operationalize these patterns . AI coding assistants jump straight to code, silently make design decisions, forget constraints mid-conversation, and produce output nobody reviewed against real engineering standards. Lattice fixes this with composable skills in ...

Walmart employed approximately 2.1 million associates worldwide at the close of fiscal year 2026, holding its position as the largest private employer on the planet. About 1.6 million of those workers are based in the United States. This article covers the latest workforce numbers, pay rates, demographics, country breakdowns, and turnover data tied to Walmart’s global staff. Walmart Employee Statistics 2026 – TLDR Walmart employed 2.1 million associates worldwide as of January 31, 202...

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago , in 2020. I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection. I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work? Through the magic of buying two HomePods mini (pictured above), I found out. A video detailing the process is embedded be...

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, but the biggest quite frankly is that we’re so early with this stuff, and the thought of locking all the experimentation away from the average developer really upsets me. Frustrating...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicola Losito, whose blog can be found at nicolalosito.it . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, my name is Nicola Losito. Born in the mi...

Marc Andreessen Egg Game Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-egg-game Marc Andreessen Egg Game Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-eg...

Suppose that x is a variable of an unsigned type. In C/C++, it could be of type size_t for example. You have an expression like 6 * x and you want to know whether 6 * x overflows. That is, you want to know if 6 * x exceeds the range of values that can be represented by the type. In most cases, a variable of type size_t will be about to represent all values in the range [0, 2^64-1] . Instead of 64, let me use a variable for the number of bits: [0, 2^L-1] . The easiest approach i...

In the wake of copy.fail , there are more vulnerabilities that have been announced: Copy Fail 2: Electric Boogaloo Dirty Frag Right now would be one of the best times for a supply chain attack via NPM to hit hard. Outside of Linux kernel patches from your distro, I think it's probably a good idea to put a moratorium on installing new software for a week or so. In the wake of copy.fail , there are more vulnerabilities that hav...

As the blog of record in computational complexity, we like to bring attention to those in the community who have left us. When we learn of someone in our field who has died, Bill and I will talk to each other and decide whether we should do a social media post or a full blog post, and who should write it, Bill, me, or someone else. In fact, if I call Bill, he'll often answer the phone with "who died?" We also remember those who passed away during the year in our end-of-year post. One challenge i...

Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create problems that their colleagues have to spend time solving. That’s why many tech companies try to build a small, ludicrously well-paid team instead of a large team of more average engineers, and why so far this seems to be a win...

Another day, another Linux exploit. It’s been hard to keep track over the last few months. Vulnerabilities are inevitable, but they do highlight my concerns again regarding monocultures. Any post I’ve ever written warning about monocultures and Linux (or as I’ve taken to calling my home desktop, KDE/Linux) is received with howls of protest, especially when they escape containment and end up on the usual news aggregator sites. I’ll either be accused of misunderstanding Linux, or oversta...

In 1947, the United States government did something that its own politicians would have called socialism if anyone else had done it. Under American military occupation, Japan’s agricultural land was seized from landlords and sold to the tenant farmers who had been working it, at prices set well below market value, paid in bonds that inflation promptly turned into confetti. This was expropriation, and it worked. The Cold War was the reason. American planners in Tokyo feared that rural poverty...

Left:  Venus as it would approximately look to the human eye, imaged by NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft ( full globe view ),  Right:  Radar image (false-color) of Venus’ surface taken by NASA’s Magellan orbiter ( full globe view ) Why explore Venus VERITAS, NASA’s Venus mapper EnVision, Europe’s mission to Venus ISRO’s plan to study Venus in unprecedented detail alongside NASA and ESA Related: Coverage of India’s exploration of Mars ...

This text below post is presented verbatim, as it was typed with only a keyboard: without a display or any assistive technology. Typos are left in. The "Notes after writing" and "My writing setup" sections were typed on my Mac as I prepared to publish the post. This is my first ever blog post written without a display. I have wanted a tool like this for a while, but my motivation for finally building something was seeing Jo's excellent implementation of the idea. Jo used a Raspberry Pi 400 with ...

Yesterday I received an email from the Thunderbird team inviting me to join a preview of their new hosted email service, Thunderbird Pro . I love email, so was very keep to sign up and test it out. Before we get into this, I want to say that Thunderbird Pro is still under active development, please bear that in mind. Also, these are just my opinions, please don't get butthurt. What is Thunderbird Pro? I hate it when people explain what things are in a blog post, but I think it's warran...

Oh you mean like with audio output instead Nope. No output at all. Just input. With the keyboard. Why Short answer: why not? Long answer: James floated this idea at IWC / BTconf of a PC that's just a keyboard for taking notes; and I said that's totally doable and probably not hard at all to do, since computers that are inside a keyboard already exist. So here's me putting my money where my mouth is. Read more on the site… Oh you mean like with audio output instead No...